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Preemptive Strike
A North Kitsap High School sophomore is awaiting a juvenile court hearing, accused of creating a hit list and threatening to shoot fellow students.
So begins the story of a 16-year-old in my local community who was arrested last night. Given that there was a school shooting elsewhere in Washington State in the last week, people here are a little on edge concerning violence in schools. In many minds, the response to students saying someone was planning to kill other students was entirely reasonable. I don’t see it that way.
The basic rundown of what happened is this: two kids tell a parent they overheard another student threaten to shoot-up the school and that he supposedly had a hit list. The parent called the school district, received no response, and then called police:
A fast-moving police investigation led to a search warrant executed on the teen’s home and a trip to the juvenile detention center shortly before midnight… Police found guns belonging to the boy’s parents at the home, but it was unclear if the boy had access to the weapons. Investigators say they are trying to determine if this was a legitimate threat or a really bad attempt at a joke… Police say they have yet to find the alleged hit list. The teen is being held on a felony harassment complaint. He is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon.
I concur with responding to credible threats but — when the threat can’t be substantiated — the state should stand down. Of course, it did not: the boy has been arrested and will be arraigned on felony charges of harassment.
Thinking there is no way a comment made to a third party can be construed as harrasment I looked up the law. According to RCW 9A.46.020:
(1) A person is guilty of harassment if:
(a) Without lawful authority, the person knowingly threatens:
(i) To cause bodily injury immediately or in the future to the person threatened or to any other person
Here’s what bothers me about this: the child did nothing. He spoke words. If there is evil intent in his heart — or if there were demonstrable actions behind his words — then by all means do something , but we don’t criminalize thoughts and feelings in this nation.
Image credit: Shutterstock user racorn.
Published in General
One of the local stations aired a story that can only be described as sensational. It led with saying police found “an arsenal” in the home. Only later in the story did they define the arsenal as a handgun, a shotgun, and a rifle. The people in this area seem wholly uninterested in the relevant facts and are fixated on feeling something be it fear, justification, moral superiority, etc.
http://www.kirotv.com/videos/online/video-16-year-old-arrested-for-allegedly/vCzC56/
It does not matter if you turn your back or not. I carry an 88 magnum, it shoots through schools….
I alway get a kick out of how the news report weapons. Everybody seems to have an “arsenal” and their definition of an “arsenal” usually contain less weapons than I carry in my truck on a normal basis.
In search of an insider perspective I inquired with a close friend who also happens to be assistant superintendent of one of the local school districts. I asked:
His reply:
His final statement is really what sticks with me in all these school violence situations. What do we do once we know there is a problem? Are we merely dealing with effect (I think so), or are we working toward discovering and handling the cause as well?
If I can’t equip my own cavalry regiment, I’d bristle at anybody calling my collection an “arsenal.”
[Edited: Cavalry, not calvary…though the concept of a “Calvary regiment”…]
“Incomplete, inconclusive, or in dispute” is how these kinds of stories generally turn out.
Sounds like an astute appraisal…
Hear, hear!
When I was a teenager, we students had a popular twist on a Christmas jingle:
In fact, I think I sang that in elementary school. Hundreds of kids knew the lyric, yet somehow our schools survived.
It would be easy to be too complacent, though. On the one hand, yes, kids say all sorts of horrible things either as jokes or as unserious outbursts (as too many adults continue to do). They are little hormonal bombs of rebellion and anger. On the other hand, teenagers also commonly act on their impulses without giving any thought to the consequences. When adults only brood, kids are more likely to act.
Easy warrants concern me. Frivolous criminal charges, possibly intended to justify police activity, concern me. But a threat to kill should be punished if it seems specific and serious (more than merely an expression of ill will) because there is no recovery from death. People may be held responsible for their words (generally by non-legal sanctions) and kids need to learn that.
Was this particular threat serious? Did the scale of the threat merit a lower standard of evidence sufficient for a warrant? Could it be addressed without legal intervention?
This case demonstrates the need within any system of laws or mores for prudential, individual judgments. Rules and laws can only ever guide our decisions, not make them for us.
But KP, maybe the authorities did have more detail.
Words can be a crime if they’re conveying a credible threat. And I agree it should be so. Of course it shouldn’t be treated as severely as actual assault or attempted assault, and there should be multiple “reality check” levels before it gets to the point of prosecution, but that’s why we have a process – these things aren’t always obvious one way or the other.
Evidence they might have been searching for could include unknown weapons in the kid’s possession, written corroboration, video, plans, etc. If they didn’t find any of that then that, to me, is evidence that the threat wasn’t credible or really a threat at all. Demeanor of the kid, while imperfect, also comes into play. But like I said in the last post, for most of us not involved the case is best described as “incomplete, inconclusive, or in dispute”.
The big problem with our schools and any organization today is that they are so afraid of lawsuits that it has eliminated the ability of principals, managers, supervisors, and bosses to show judgment.
Yes, and despite the stories we hear, kids still say things like that all the time and the adults around them still make prudential judgements. Sometimes, though, there’s just something about one of the kids that raises an alarm. Or sometimes it’s ambiguous enough to merit further investigation. We hear about the latter cases because they out of the ordinary while the former goes unreported because they’re so unremarkable.
Hey, remember last week when a gunman who was already known to authorities shot up the House of Commons and plenty of people (not on Ricochet, but elsewhere) questioned why the police didn’t intervene sooner…
“Evidence they might have been searching for could include unknown weapons in the kid’s possession, written corroboration, video, plans, etc. If they didn’t find any of that then that, to me, is evidence that the threat wasn’t credible or really a threat at all. Demeanor of the kid, while imperfect, also comes into play.”
I’m down with all of that. It took from around 4PM till near midnight to obtain a warrant, search the house (the weapons of the parents were confiscated, grrr), and arrest the kid. If a kid makes a specific threat it should be investigated just like you said. Where this whole thing breaks down for me is in not using judgement to refrain from legal action against a troubled child. Having just been through a “someone said something now it’s all a matter for a jury to sort out” sort of ordeal I may be a little biased. Of course, the entire matter screams for someone to ask if this would have been handled the same way the week before the Marysville shooting than it was handled the week after.
I agree. However, we face a difficulty: if the kid is truly troubled, we can excuse the threat (assuming that it was credible-enough) and favor “help” over prosecution. How will that work, though? Will it work quickly enough to protect the community (again, assuming that the threat was credible/serious)? Who makes those decisions?
I haven’t read anywhere in this where the parents (notice the plural) have been involved in decision making at all, which is also troubling.
I make no excuses for sociopaths and evil, but I cannot fathom that most of these school shooters fall into that category. Barring plain old evil being the cause, try to imagine the pressures required to drive a normal child to this level of desperation. That is what we need to be focusing on.
Well sure, but the time for parent involvement is before it gets to the point of threats (again, speaking generally and assuming that a threat is credible/serious). After that there’s more at stake than just the troubled kid, and that troubled kid’s parents are probably not the best arbiters at that point for many potential reasons.
Speaking from some direct experience and even more indirect experience, parent involvement is often of not much effect if a kid is troubled enough. If we’re talking mental illness, then it seems we’re now at a disadvantage with the demolition of state psychiatric facilities (not that that system didn’t have serious problems). Sometimes there’s just not much parents can do for troubled kids and sometimes there’s not much the rest of us can do until something awful happens.
I’ve always that thought that two things could go a long way to improve our communities: prison reform (make it safer, less comfortable, more isolation, and mostly shorter sentences) and more rigorous provisions for dealing with mental illness patients (like facilities for those straddling the line between public threat and public nuisance). The trick, of course, is in coming up with details that don’t have serious downsides. There are no easy answers, though.
Luckily we happen to have a thread going on that…
When I was in school many moons ago kids were always fantasizing about doing horrible things to other kids. Everyone understood it was just fantasy. It was probably a good way to reduce anxiety over some perceived slight or other ill treatment. Kids can be pretty cruel to each other.
Of course, in those days the idea of taking a gun to school and shooting people never occurred to anyone, not even in their fantasies.
Here’s another thing about “those days.” You could buy a rifle through mail order. Near anybody could walk into a sporting goods store, or even a hardware store, and buy a gun. Guns were a whole lot easier to obtain. But hardly anybody did, at least not for evil purposes.
“I cringe when I hear stories like this one, because around 1988, when I was in high school, I had written up a “hit list,” myself.”
I appears from most of the above posts, that I should be in prison for life. Back in the ’50s most of us had a hit list. The idea being, “when I grow up and become a dictator, these are all the people I’m going to line up against a wall and take out.”
And we’d joke with each other, “Am I on your list yet?” or “Keep it up and you are going on my list.” We’d actually play cops and robbers, with “real” cap guns. We’d hid behind trees and bushes, pretend to get shot and fall over. Or yell, “I just took out grandpa.” Or cowboys and Indians, with bows and arrows with “real” rubber stoppers on the ends.
In my opinion, this kind of play can release a lot of hostility, and I don’t think it ever crossed our minds to actually put this kind of play into real action. And I have played these games with my grandchildren, except with “paint balls”. What kind of games can children play now to release pent up emotion? Especially since biting the corner out of a pop tart will get you sent to the principals office.
“Here’s what bothers me about this: the child did nothing. He spoke words. If there is evil intent in his heart — or if there were demonstrable actions behind his words — then by all means do something , but we don’t criminalize thoughts and feelings in this nation.”
Oh yes we do.
It is stories like this that make me think I need to hide my firearms in such away that they don’t get found. At least some of them.
this is very true.
yes, but in the intervening years, hit lists have been made, and action has been taken on them. We can never go back to the “fantasy play” once someone has been made it a reality.
KP, your insight, sensitivity and observation is important and extremely valuable in this topic, because there ARE gray areas in managing accusations, like those for this young person (and also in circumstances like yours, and even others), that should be noted and considered.
The words of your friend stated in earlier comments are also insightful. Thank you for starting this post, and for continuing the discussion.
Though I never had an actual hit list, it would have been the work of a moment to commit one to paper. I spent my eight grade year in a black pit of alienation. Not that any individual or group singled me out for dehumanization, I managed that well enough on my own.
And not that I was ever going to do anything. There’s a step between desire and thought, and between thought and action. I never moved past an unfocused desire. But my first thought on reading about a kid with a hit list is to sympathize with that kid.
I don’t know about enforcement. I can imagine circumstances where the appropriate reaction would be a point on a very broad spectrum, inclusive of what the cops actually did. Sure, I have constitutional reservations on some of these points, but it’s possible the constitutional protections don’t rightly apply. I find it difficult to exercise judgment in a case which requires judgment and I know none of the people involved. I’m certainly not going to trust the papers to have the facts perfectly right.
In those days if we took a gun to school there was a gun locker in the vice principal’s office where we could store it and not have to lug it around to class.
In these days you cannot give a pocketknife to your child because they might forget and take it to school.
More reason to homeschool.